Ouch! Ten out of ten declines on submithub.com (music blog directory) for the Monster music video demo. Four out of the ten were clearly negative along the lines of ‘I don’t like/understand this’ but the other six were more positive and constructive, ‘good video, interesting song but needs more elements and/or instrumentation’. Submit Hub and the like can make for some tough reading but its worth its weight in gold if you’re self producing your own material. Critical feedback is essential if I hope to develop each demo.

That said the reviews also made me carefully consider what the next video demo should be; most likely a song called ‘Ashes’ – one of the more melodic and accessible tunes from the eight that are already written. As mentioned in the previous blog post I’d like start work on a video for one of the electronic tunes too but it’ll really depend on the amount of time (and sanity) I can put into production work over the next few months. The video for Monster was far more ambitious (taking approx four weeks of work) than I had thought. It became more engrossing, and anxiety inducing, as I got into the post production as there was a lot of learning curves for me to get my head around; visual effects, grading and color matching. It also took me a while to understand the basics of the excellent freeware video editor Davinci Resolve which was a step up from Adobe’s Premiere Elements. Some of the comments also had me reconsidering the benefits of adding other instruments. I had initially decided I wanted to keep it as minimal and rough as possible, just guitar and voice, to really place the focus on the rhythm and dynamics. I may try some experiments with the loop pedal I purchased a few years back thou to see if some beatboxing and fife/trumpet backing lines might help fill out one or two of the songs.
“The video for Monster was far more ambitious than I had thought”
On the visual side of things I’ve been keeping up with the daily digital painting practice and just picked up a copy of this book to try and learn a few more shortcuts. I also started bringing in some sci-fi and fantasy sketching to the weekly watercolor practicals. I’ve only done one or two thus far but its satisfying to see the benefits (particularly regarding color mixing) of all the still life painting I’d done over the last fourteen months. On the electronical music front I’ve had to go back to the drawing board with the Fat Controller re-mix. Its frustrating as I’d been working on the current arrangement since April (about 70 hours clocked) but after finishing a rough mix I released it still isn’t good enough. Hopefully V3 will work out better…